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Typing Merry Christmas...

...places me, in theory, on a very particular side of a cultural divide that was news a year or two back, and is now codified and institutionalized nonsense.

I am unable to summon the faith or the need necessary to believe Jesus Christ was (or is) the son of God. And I am not a seeker. It is enough for me to accept that great work has been done, that there may be a plan (and may not), and that my job -- our job -- is simply to be and to become the best person one can be. Everything after that is a bunch of rules and excuses for putting our fellow humans on the other side of various dividing lines.

But Christ was a fine teacher, best we can reconstruct. And what he taught seems common kindness, a necessary reminder of the power and necessity of love. We could do worse; we have done far worse, and some willful misreadings of his teachers inspire some of his would-be followers to do worse. None of which I wish to argue today.

Merry Christmas was not, when I grew up, a difficult thing to say, nor to type. In one of the few examples of religious instruction I can recall, my mother once explained to me what the X in Xmas was replacing, by way of explaining why it offended her. She has no religion, but was raised to respect such things, best I can tell.

In our need to pick sides, to identify tribes, to include and exclude people in our in-groups, we have picked a senseless fight. Christian evangelicals wish to use this occasion to remind us of their version of Christ's teachings. Secular folk wish to use this occasion to remind us of the separation of church and state, and so type "happy holidays" instead. My side of the divide.

Ah, and this nation of the mostly faithful isn't strictly a nation of Christians anymore, is it? And so there is kindness meant to our Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Wiccan friends when we type "happy holidays" instead.

Whatever.

We all understand this as Christmas season. Most of us nurture our children on Santa Claus and the Grinch, which little Maggie is watching (the Jim Carey version) as I type quickly in my back office.

No. We understand this as a competitive shopping frenzy. And since my in-laws are in the retail business (coffee and books!), and I want people to go home from the holidays with good new music in their hands (however it gets there), I'm sympathetic to all that.

Sort of.

We buy a lot of crap out of guilt.

Landfill.

My wife's church arranges Christmas for 20-odd families in Rowan County, which I mention not to brag on them, but by way of a reminder of the point of the season. It's an awkward moment of human kindness, delivering those boxes of things, and poverty has its own distinct smell. But maybe it helps. We have to believe it helps. We have to believe in our capacity to help each other. We have to believe in each other's willingness to try to help.

Anyway. I don't care what God you pray to. Or if. But an institutionalized reminder that it is our obligation as human beings to take care of each other? That we need. Dear God we need it. And if Christ is to provide the brand name for that enterprise, so be it. I've been typing "happy holidays" all week, in those few moments I've had to respond to queries, because it's easier than trying to explain all those paragraphs I typed above.

"Happy holidays" sounds like a consumer mantra. And I keep hoping we are capable of rather more than that, that our principal contribution to our social ecosystem, and to our democratic republic, is not our winter solstice purchasing power.

So Merry Christmas, friends and strangers.

And if you can't figure out what to give somebody at this point in the shopping madness, let me suggest a check to the charity of your choice.

Or, y'know, a subscription to No Depression. (Typed only by way of proving that I am a loyal American, and not entirely humorless.)

Merry Christmas.

Posted by grant on December 22, 2007 2:28 PM | Permalink

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